SOLDIERS OF IDF VS ARAB TERRORISTS

SOLDIERS OF IDF VS ARAB TERRORISTS

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

The Nazi's 'Perfect Aryan' Poster Child Was Jewish

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Hessy Taft recently presented the Yad Vashem Holocaust 
Memorial in Israel with a Nazi magazine featuring her baby 
photograph on the front cover, and told the story of how she 
became an unlikely poster child for the Third Reich.
 
When Hessy Taft was six months old, she was a poster 
child for the Nazis. Her photograph was chosen as the 
image of the ideal Aryan baby, and distributed in party 
propaganda. But what the Nazis didn't know was that their 
perfect baby was really Jewish.
 
“I can laugh about it now,” the 80-year-old Professor Taft 
told Germany’s Bild newspaper in an interview. “But if the 
Nazis had known who I really was, I wouldn't be alive.”

Prof Taft recently presented the Yad Vashem Holocaust 
Memorial in Israel with a Nazi magazine featuring her baby 
photograph on the front cover, and told the story of how she 
became an unlikely poster child for the Third Reich.

Her parents, Jacob and Pauline Levinsons, both talented 
singers, moved to Berlin from Latvia to pursue careers in 
classical music in 1928, only to find themselves caught 
up in the Nazis’ rise to power. Her father lost his job at an 
opera company because he was Jewish, and had to find 
work as a door-to-door salesman.

In 1935, with the city rife with anti-Semitic attacks, Pauline 
Levinsons took her six-month-old daughter Hessy to a 
well-known Berlin photographer to have her baby photograph 
taken.

A few months later, she was horrified to find her daughter’s 
picture on the front cover of Sonne ins Hause, a major Nazi 
family magazine. Terrified, the family would be exposed as 
Jews, she rushed to the photographer, Hans Ballin. He told 
her he knew the family was Jewish, and had deliberately 
submitted the photograph to a contest to find the most 
beautiful Aryan baby.

“I wanted to make the Nazis ridiculous,” the photographer 
told her. He succeeded: the picture won the contest, and 
was believed to have been chosen personally by the Nazi 
propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

Frightened she would be recognized on the streets and 
questions asked about her identity, Prof. Taft’s parents
kept her at home. Her photograph appeared on widely 
available Nazi postcards, where she was rrecognized 
by an aunt in distant Memel, now part of Lithuania. But 
the Nazis never discovered Prof. Taft’s true identity. In 
1938, her father was arrested by the Gestapo on a trumped 
up tax charge, but released when his accountant, a Nazi 
party member, came to his defense.

After that, the family fled Germany. They moved first to 
Latvia, before settling in Paris only for the city to fall to the 
Nazis. With the help of the French resistance, they 
escaped again, this time to Cuba, and in 1949 the 
family moved to the United States.

Today the Jewish woman who was once a Nazi poster 
child is a professor of chemistry in New York.

“I feel a little revenge,” she said of presenting her 
photograph to Yad Vashem. “Something like satisfaction.”